UX Design in Museum Guides
UX Design Process/Steps in Relation to Museum Accessibility Design
Case Study
Client:
Coursework
Service:
Research
Coursework
Research
This research project is to demonstrate my use and administration of content management systems, as well as my interest and research findings in an area of information technology of my choosing. This project's final website was written and designed by me with four other classmates. I copied the work I did for my portion of the project and transferred it to this page. My classmate's research findings can be found in the final project site linked on the side.
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In order to create an immersive and accessible experience at museums, many product/user-experience designers take the time to study and research as many users of different backgrounds as they can. They target user pain points and ideate solutions that could help enhance museum visitor's experiences through accessibility. Current key examples of digital accessibility within museums include QR codes, audio and digital guides, braille guides and more. In this blog I'm going to introduce all the steps user experience designers take to design accessible products within the museum world. A lot of guides are still a work in progress such as the audio guide. When they were first introduced, it was aimed to visually guide visitors through the museum with detailed explanations of each art and artist. Unfortunately, the audio guides seem to struggle to find a middle ground on being too vague or too detailed. This shortcoming is a great example of a user pain point that user experience designers can consider and further research on to help design a better and more helpful audio guide.
In another page, I will briefly explain and give examples of all five steps of the user experience design process. I will cover in order the empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing steps (Hunt, 2023). During each step of the design process, designers would take the time to see what the museum needs and learn to be in the users shoes to fully experience the products and see whether it's truly accessible or not. One museum I am going to conduct research on for this project is the Museum of Modern Art PS1 (Long Island City location). During this research, I am going to personally visit the museum and immerse myself in the museum experience and study the accessibility levels of the museum. I am also going to test out their digital products and see how their designers might have approached designing the products. Through this research project, I am going to discover and study the different approaches and ways museum guides tackle accessibility. I am also going to deepen my knowledge in digital museum guides and digital accessibility. Through this research I hope to brainstorm solutions and ideas on how the museum world could benefit from further digital museum guides.
As an aspiring ux designer, understanding accessibility in the real world especially where appreciated most like the museum, will enable me to become a better designer. This will also allow designers to ideate better accessibility solutions and apply other technologies for a better museum experience in the future.
Reference:
Hunt, R. (2024, May 1). What is the UX design process? 5 steps to Success. The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ux-design-process-guide
The process of UX Design consists of five steps. The steps may slightly differ depending on the courses taken, company working at, and other circumstances. The overall gist of conducting user research, understanding pain points, designing prototypes and wireframes etc. are all similarly done. Below is the order of UX design process according to (Hunt, 2023).
Let's dive into each step in relation to accessibility design within the museum world.
(Hunt, 2023)
A ux designer's greatest strategy to have to be most successful in the field is empathy. The importance of empathy is pretty straight forward as it is required in the first step of the ux design process. During this step, designers find a way to connect with their users and truly understand their user's pain points. An example of a digital guide in the museum world is QR codes! QR codes were first introduced as a tool to help museum visitors enhance their experience. Museums and ux designers saw that accessibility in museums were limited and dug into the issue in hopes to find a solid solution. User experience designers put themselves in the shoes of museum visitors to understand where accessibility is most needed and how it can be accessibly implemented in museums. When designers see a problem and immerse themselves in the issue, they began their first step in the ux design process.
During this step, ux designer's empathy will turn into a research plan. Designers will plan out questions to consider while trying to solve user pain points. Some key elements designers would consider are:
(Hunt, 2023)
Research methods designers practice include conducting an interview, sending out surveys and/or questionnaires to find out more about the user pain points and their wants and needs. Once the key elements are identified and thoroughly researched, designers design deliverables. The deliverables include:
Basically an anticipated/existing traced user journey. For example, the navigation bar designed with anticipation of where users would surf through and their thought processes.
Are fictional characters built around gathered user pain points, goals, needs and wants. Example on the left of my own user persona designed for NYPL website re-design.
This tool allows designers to collect a collection of quotes by their users and categorize them by different themes to better understand common ideas and themes. Image is a sample affinity diagram made by my team and I for the NYPL website re-design.
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Visually impaired museum visitor is visiting a museum with their friend. They have their friend guide them through the museum and try to describe each painting with great detail. The visually impaired friend is very thankful for their friend helping them out, but they want a more professional guide that could also teach them more about different art terms, time periods, etc. The visually impaired visitor wishes there was a way for them to imagine the artwork to every detail. They need an audio guide to describe extremely detailedly the artwork or artist they are interested in. An audio guide would help the visually impaired friend enjoy the museum to a better capacity and feel inclusive.
During this stage, designers begin to brainstorm different solutions to the user pain points. It's expected and normal for the first product idea to not be executed the same way it was first ideated. This stage is crucial for designers to get together with other designers, engineers, researchers and other members in general to get feedback and enhance existing ideas.
Accessibility becomes very critical during the prototyping stage. When designers get the green light on the solution, they begin to design low and high fidelity prototypes for testing. The designers rely a lot of the previous research findings. During the prototype stage, designers begin to consider colors, size, hierarchy, typography etc all the different features of accessibility. Prototyping stage in relation to museum audio guides would include designers designing the digital guide so that it is easily readable for the visually impaired. In order to get to the audio guide, there is some form of other interface interaction such as finding the QR code that leads to the guide. The QR code must be big enough for the visually impaired to see. The guide must also include pause, skip, find, etc buttons that are easily accessible and visible through the visitor's mobile phone.
After designing low-fi and high-fi prototypes, UX designers will gather a group of users who can participate in the prototype testing process. During this step, UX designers will study whether the low-fi or high-fi prototypes they designed are ready to be launched or not. Things designers would consider is the accessibility level of the product as well as how much does the product solve the initial problem. The principal designers will go back to their background research step and see if the user pain points were indeed resolved or not. This step is especially important as it will allow UX designers to determine whether they have to step back and conduct further research or if the product is ready for the public. Audio guides are now available in museums which can be taken as the testing/evaluating the product stage as there are many feedbacks on how audio guides benefit the users and suggestions on how it could be better.
References:
Hunt, R. (2024, May 1). What is the UX design process? 5 steps to Success. The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ux-design-process-guide
Nathan, L. (2023, December 15). 14 ways to use QR codes in a museum. The Jotform Blog. https://www.jotform.com/blog/qr-code-museum
Pan, S., & Wang, Z. (2019). The Exploration of Smart Object Design Method-Applying User Experience Five
Elements for Smart Object Design from Theory Research to Design Practice. Journal of Physics. Conference Series,
1207(1), 12007-. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1207/1/012007
Salazar, K. (2024, January 16). 7 ways to analyze a customer-journey map. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/analyze-customer-journey-map/
The Museum of Modern Art PS1 quickly became one of my favorite museums to visit for free when I started spending more time in Long Island City. The big letters outside their museum writing “Artists Make New York” first caught my eyes and I am excited to conduct research on the accessibility level of the museum. Follow through my case study to learn more about MoMA PS1’s digital accessibility guide.
As soon as I got to the museum, I got my bag checked and a free entrance. As soon as I turned from the front desk to head to the museum, I was welcomed by this sign with the QR code for the museum’s digital guide.
The sign was extremely easily accessible. It was one of the first things I saw walking into the museum as it was around 34 x 18 inches big. After scanning the QR code, my Safari opened to the link. Then I got a pop-up requesting to open the App Store to download the Bloomberg Connects app.
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I did a quick browse through the app and was pleased to see many different museum, exhibition, etc guides for more than just the MoMA. I clicked on the search and found the guides to the MoMA PS1.AdvertisementI began my research by making my first stop to Melissa Cody‘s exhibition. Right before entering the exhibition room, there was a huge sign describing the artist, her background and details about her artwork. I checked on the digital guide hoping to see an audio guide version of the artist’s introduction. Unfortunately, there was only a digital text version with no audio guide. This came quite as a shock for me as I imagined one of the most important audio guides for a museum to be the artist introduction.
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After circling around the exhibition slightly disappointed, I decided to further browse the app and found the audio guide for this exhibition.
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The audio guide was split into five sections (refer to screenshot for guide titles). Each audio guide was guided by the artist herself which I thought was very pleasant. The audio guides were short, no more than 2-minutes, guide with the artist detailing her generational weave story, inspirations and artwork.
I continued my view of the exhibition and found no further accessible guides. The digital guide made the in-person text descriptions digitally accessible, but did not make it accessible for visitors who require special needs. Though it provided limited audio guides, I hoped there would be more detailed audio descriptions of each artwork the same way there are text descriptions beside every piece.
That is all! Thank you so much for your time and I hope this case study was insightful, informative and interesting. Please email me at iohx@pratt.edu if you have further questions and/or comments.